Mercury
Retrograde
A
Dark Alchemy Novel
Book
Two
Laura
Bickle
On-Sale 10/27/2015
ISBN: 9780062437617
About the Book:
Geologist Petra Dee and the
citizens of Temperance, Wyoming come up against a venomous enemy, not to
mention a biker gang that’s hell on wheels, in the second book in Laura
Bickle’s Dark Alchemy series.
Something venomous has come to
Temperance…
It’s been two months since Petra
Dee and her coyote sidekick Sig faced off against Temperance’s resident
alchemist, but things are far from quiet. When an Internet video of a massive
snake in the backcountry of Yellowstone goes viral, a chase for the mythical
basilisk is on. Monster hunters swarm into the area, and never one to pass up
the promise of discovery, Petra joins in the search.
Among the newcomers is a snake
cult on wheels - the biker gang Sisters of Serpens. Unlike some, the Sisters
don’t want to kill the basilisk - they want to worship it. But things get
complicated when the basilisk develops a taste for human flesh that rivals the
Sisters’ own murderous skills.
Meanwhile, the alchemical tree of
life is dying, and the undead Hanged Men of Temperance who depend on it know
the basilisk may be their last chance for survival.
With time running out for
everyone around her, Petra will be forced to decide who survives and who she
must leave behind in this action-packed sequel to Dark Alchemy.
CHAPTER
ONE: DUST
No
matter how decent Petra Dee’s intentions were, things always went
to sh**.
Sweat
dribbled down the back of her neck, sliding down her shoulder blades
and congealing between her skin and the Tyvek biohazard suit. The
legs of the suit made a zip-zip
sound, snagging on bits of prickly pear as she walked through the
underbrush of Yellowstone National Park. She clutched her tool bag
tightly in her gloved grip, the plastic of the suit rustling over the
hiss of the respirator in her ears. Her breath fogged the scuffed
clear mask of the suit, softening the edges of the land before her
with a dreamlike filter.
“You
don’t have to do this,” Mike said.
“Consider
it a professional favor, okay?” she said. “And you said it was
weird. Now, I’m curious.”
The
park ranger in the suit in front of her stopped, turned, and
awkwardly grabbed her sleeve. “Look, you don’t have to. The
hikers who found it said it was pretty gruesome.” Mike’s voice
was muffled behind his own mask, but his brow creased as he looked at
her. It was clear to her that he now thought better of bringing her
here. Maybe it was his dumb, misplaced sense of chivalry, or maybe
things really did suck as badly as he suggested. With him, it was
hard to tell.
“You
can go back,” he suggested. Again.
“Mike.
You need a geologist. There isn’t anybody on your staff who can
tell you if it’s safe to be up here. Weird seismic s*** has been
happening in the last couple of weeks—new springs and fumaroles and
mudpots opening up in this area, stuff that isn’t on the maps. And
you’re stuck with me unless you want to wait for the Department of
the Interior to show up and tell you what you need to know.” She
didn’t want to be having this discussion out in the open. There
were more men and women in suits behind them, far behind, waiting to
see what Mike and Petra would do. They might not be within earshot,
but it offended her sense of professionalism. “Besides, I owe you.”
And
she did, big-time. Petra had a knack for causing trouble for Mike.
Since she’d shown up in town two months ago to take a
quiet-sounding geology gig with the federal government, she’d
managed to stumble into an underground war between a cattle baron and
the local drug-dealing alchemist. A shitstorm of administrative
paperwork had been generated for Mike when drugs and bodies turned up
in his jurisdiction. Pizza and beer only went so far to balance the
scales of debt.
Mike
rubbed the back of his hood with a crinkling sound. “Yeah, but …”
Petra
nodded sharply. “I can do this.” Her voice sounded steadier than
she felt.
“If
you need outta here, just say the word.” Mike started walking
again, pushing aside a branch blocking her way.
She
moved forward to the edge of the tree line, beyond where blotches of
color swam in her sweaty vision. A campsite. A red tent had been
pitched in a clearing, though it tilted in a lopsided fashion on a
broken pole, like a giant spider someone had plucked a leg from. Nice
tent—a deluxe model, with mesh windows and pop-outs. A dead fire
with cold ash was surrounded by a ring of rocks. Laundry dangled from
a clothesline: T-shirts, jeans, socks.
And
beyond it, a gorgeously pink mudpot. Iron in the underlying slurry
likely yielded the soft rose color. The acidic hot spring burbled
mud, steaming into the cool air. She was reminded of the steam rising
from mountains as the dew baked off in the spring. There were
thousands of these mudpots dotted all throughout Yellowstone National
Park, too many to catalog, despite the hazards they posed.
Petra
ducked under the clothesline, wrestling for a moment with a pair of
child-sized purple leggings that seemed determined to get snagged
around her respirator hose. After fighting them off, she turned her
attention back to the scene.
A
dark-haired man sat upright at the edge of the dead fire, hunched
forward, his arms tangled in a blanket as if he’d been trying to
protect himself from the cold.
Her
breath echoed quickly in her mask. Mike moved forward to kneel before
the man. Pulling the blanket off, he reached for his neck to take his
pulse.
Early
morning sunshine illuminated the man’s face. It was slack, jaw
open, violet tongue protruding from his lips. Broken capillaries
covered his cheeks, the red contrasting with mottled grey skin. His
eyes were frozen wide open, and the sclera were bright red instead of
white.
The
blanket fell away to reveal a red flannel shirt. Oddly enough, it
looked as if part of it had been bleached, as if he’d brushed up
against a gallon of white paint. A knife glinted in his right hand,
trapped in a claw frozen by rigor mortis. Petra squinted to get a
good look. The knife was a piece of junk—the blade had been melted.
The
body rolled over on its side, landing like an action figure holding
its pose in the dirt.
Mike
swore and grabbed his radio. “This is L-6, be advised that we’ve
confirmed a male victim. Tell the medics to …”
Petra
turned. That was a big tent. Too big for just one guy. And then there
were the little girls’ leggings that she’d tussled with … damn
it. Steeling herself, she crossed to the tent, her suit creaking.
Sweating, she grasped the tent zipper. Its teeth stuck in the
PVC-coated canvas, and she tried three times before she gave up. Part
of the tent had come unstaked on the right side, letting daylight
creep in. She worked that seam and pulled it open.
She
stumbled back, falling on her ass.
A
woman sat bolt upright in a sleeping bag, with speckled and broken
skin like the man at the fireside. She stared at Petra with the same
blood-red gaze under a tangle of brown hair.
Petra
leaned forward to touch her shoulder. The woman didn’t move, frozen
in some unfathomable moment of shock. Heart hammering, Petra fumbled
for a pulse. Through her gloves, the woman felt cold, and her chest
didn’t move. Her skin felt swollen, as if stretched over an unseen
trauma.
Mike
crawled into the tent to stare at a bundle beside the woman. He
peeled back a sleeping bag on a little girl, maybe five or six,
clutching a dinosaur plush toy. Her eyes were closed, seeming very
peaceful under bruised skin.
“Please
let her be alive,” Petra whispered.
Mike
shook his head. “No pulse. But … not a mark on her.”
Petra
backed out of the tent into the clearing. Blinking, she reached for
her equipment bag and dug out a handheld yellow gas monitor. Stabbing
at the buttons, she waited for the sensors to start analyzing the
air.
She
glanced at the mudpot, that beautiful pink jewel barely the size of a
bathtub. The warmth it radiated condensed against her plastic suit.
When the call came in that a man had been found dead near a mudpot in
Yellowstone, the rangers had all assumed that the culprit was
poisonous gas, carbon dioxide or hydrogen sulfide. And that would
make sense, but …
While
waiting for the gas monitor to calibrate, Petra stood to peer into
the bubbling mud. It was possible, but poisoning by those gases was a
relatively rare phenomenon. She fished some tongue depressors out of
her pack to dip a glob of the mud out into a specimen bottle for
analysis.
A
sharp drumming sounded overhead, and she looked up.
A
woodpecker drilled into a pine tree above her, making a sound like a
jackhammer. Birds had much more delicate respiratory systems than
humans. If poisonous gas had seeped up from the mud here, then the
bird should be showing ill effects. But instead it had found its
breakfast, plucking bugs from bark, ignoring the humans below.
Her
gaze scraped the perimeter of the camp. The vegetation was all wrong
here—brittle and yellow and spotted, as if burned by something
acidic. She knelt to pluck a piece of curled grass to stuff into a
specimen bottle. Low-level amounts of hydrogen sulfide were likely to
enhance plant growth. High levels could kill plants, but not quickly.
She
glanced down at her gas detector. “Huh.”
Mike
had backed away from the tent. “Well?”
“No
carbon monoxide. No sulfur dioxide. Normal amounts of carbon dioxide.
No appreciable levels of hydrogen sulfide right now, which is what I
assumed the culprit would be, since that’s the most common airborne
poison spewed by mudpots.” She pulled the hood of her suit back to
take a sniff of the air. It smelled like pine needles, not like
rotten eggs. “I think that it’s safe for your people to come in.
Just … tell them not to touch anything they don’t have to. Gloves
and suits.”
Mike
nodded and began barking orders into his walkie-talkie.
Petra
lifted her freckled face to the sky, feeling the blessedly cool
breeze against her cheeks. She spat a bit of dark blond hair out of
her mouth and reached to take another soil sample. Maybe there was
some other toxin here? Something more exotic that would need more
tests run. Arsenic could be here, but it wouldn’t have killed these
people so quickly. The ground was opening up in pockets in the whole
Pelican Creek area. Geologists had been detecting midlevel quakes in
previously quiet land. In a place like Yellowstone, the geology was
always changing, but this was unusual. And it needed to be
investigated.
Mike
mopped his brow. “Maybe there were high levels here overnight, and
the wind swept it all away,” he mused. “Or the mudpot belched. A
one-time thing.”
“Could
be.” Inspiration struck her, and she stood to examine the man’s
body by the dead fire. He lay where he’d fallen, rigidly on his
side. “Could you help me with him?”
“Sure.
What do you need?”
“I
need to check his pockets for change.”
Mike
rolled the guy over. The body didn’t turn over with a normal thick,
human sound. Petra heard sloshing, as if they were moving a cooler
full of melted ice. Mike came up with a set of car keys and a fistful
of change, which he handed to Petra. She stared at the debris,
pushing aside the quarters, nickels, and dimes in her palm.
“Whatcha
lookin’ for?”
“Pennies
… ah.” She held a penny up to the light. A 2015 penny, bright and
shiny and new. “It wasn’t hydrogen sulfide poisoning.”
“How
can you tell?”
“If
he’d been exposed to hydrogen sulfide, the copper in the penny
would have oxidized. No evidence of that, here. When hydrogen sulfide
was used as a chemical weapon in World War I, copper coins in the
pockets of victims turned nearly black.”
“Great.
Maybe the coroner’s toxicology report will tell us what it was. I’m
mostly just concerned that we’ve got an ongoing hazard situation
here.”
“I’ll
run some soil samples,” Petra said. “In the meantime, you should
have your rangers cordon this off for at least a hundred yards until
we know for sure what it was.” She wrinkled her nose and reached
for her respirator. “What the hell is that smell?” It wasn’t
the rotten-eggs smell of hydrogen sulfide. This smelled worse, like
roadkill.
Mike
turned to the body. “It …” The smell hit him, and he struggled
to pull his hood over his head. “It’s the body.”
Where
the camper’s corpse had been turned over to the earth, a black,
viscous substance oozed. Two medics had arrived in full gear and
grasped the body, one at the arms and the other at the feet. As they
lifted, it seemed as if some fragile surface tension held by the
man’s skin failed. The skin split open, and dark fluid soaked the
dirt to splash against the white suits of the medics.
“Christ,”
Mike said behind his mask. “Only a floater would behave like that.”
“A
floater?” she echoed.
“A
body that’s been in a river for weeks. The gases build up while the
organs rot. But … these guys can’t have been here that long.
We’ll know for sure when we get an ID.”
More
plastic suits showed up with body bags into which to pour what
remained of the camper. They discussed how best to remove the woman
and the child from the tent without rupturing them. It was decided to
start with the child.
Petra
turned away. She just didn’t want to see that. She began picking at
samples around the edge of the campsite, trying to fade into the
background. But the scene burned behind her eyelids. It wasn’t just
the people that were dead. Death had spread to the vegetation around
the campsite in a circle, as if someone had sprayed the plants with
weed killer. As she ventured farther and farther away, she found a
trail of rust-colored grass vanishing into the forest.
Ignoring
the chatter and radio static behind her, she began to follow the
trail. It spanned an area a little over three feet wide, a perfect
path of brittle vegetation that contrasted sharply with the early
autumn grass that still thrived. She paused before a pine tree that
seemed to have had its bark scorched away by some kind of chemical
reaction.
She
began to regret removing her hood. Holding her breath, she chipped a
piece of bark away with an awl and dropped it into a sample bottle.
The
track ended abruptly at a spine of rocks that composed the next
ridge. There were no plants to speak of here, only fine milk quartz
pebbles and sandstone gravel.
She
blew out her breath, frustrated at having lost the trail. Had there
been some kind of chemical accident here? She ran through the
desiccants and herbicides she knew, most of which were not good for
people, but the most likely short-term effects would have been simple
respiratory distress or skin contact allergies. Nothing that could
cause the amount of squish and slop that the medics were dealing
with.
No
rational explanation.
Maybe
there was an irrational one.
She
glanced behind her. No one had followed her this far, to the edge of
the forest. She fumbled in her gear bag for the last bit of equipment
she’d brought: a golden compass. Glinting in the sun, it lay flat
in the palm of her hand. Seven rays extended to the rim, with an
image of a golden lion devouring the sun in the center. The Venificus
Locus,
a
magic detector that she still wasn’t entirely sure she believed in,
but couldn’t discount. Maybe it would have something to say. Maybe
it wouldn’t. But not asking the question would be stupid.
She
stripped off her glove, wiggling her sweaty fingers in the air. A
hangnail that she’d neglected to trim kept annoying her. She ripped
it off and hissed when blood welled up around the cuticle. Clumsily,
she sloshed a bright drop of it into the groove circumscribing the
outside of the compass. The blood sizzled on contact, then gathered
itself into a perfectly round bead. It circled the rim of the compass
once, twice …
Petra
held her breath, as much in anticipation as not wanting to spill the
blood. The bead of blood swung back and forth in an agitated fashion,
then settled on north, pointing to the campsite right behind her.
“Great,”
she muttered. That was pretty decisive. The compass would have just
sucked up the blood if no magic was present.
This
was weird land. The nearby town, Temperance, had been founded by
Lascaris, an alchemist who’d conjured gold from dead rocks. Some of
Lascaris’s old experiments still wandered the countryside. She’d
encountered a few of them in her short time here: the Hanged Men, the
Alchemical Tree of Life, and the Locus itself—which she’d been
told had been made by Lascaris’s own hands.
A
shadow flickering through sunlight caught her eye, and she looked up.
She half-anticipated it to be the woodpecker foraging for more
insects, but froze when she spied a raven watching her, balanced on
the edge of a branch. His eyes reflected no light, his shadow
mingling among the flickers of needles and branches of the lodgepole
pine.
She
stared back at it. It might be an ordinary raven. Or it might be one
of the raven familiars of the Hanged Men. She turned the compass
toward the bird. The drop of blood spiraled halfway around the disk
before the bird, alerted, took wing and vanished.
Things
around here were rarely ordinary.
****
Clear
now.
The
raven pumped his wings, pulling himself into the blue sky, as far as
he could get from the smell of blood in the compass and the aura of
poison clinging to the campsite. He caught an updraft from the
sun-warmed land, skimming along the south edge of the mountains, over
the dark ribbons of road and the dry grasses of autumn fields.
This
draft required little effort from him. He stretched his wings and
allowed his eyes to drift shut. The sun felt gloriously warm on his
back, seeping through his feathers into his light body. In the sky,
things were simple. There was no magic that could touch him here. No
blood. No pain. There was just sun and air and sky.
He
sailed along the current until it weakened. He twitched his feathers,
gave in to the instinct to flap his wings, and opened his eyes to
look down.
A
vast field spread below him, gold and grassy and glinting with dew. A
massive elm tree stood at its center, and below its shade stood a man
in a white hat.
The
raven made a slow spiral, relishing the last bit of air through his
feathers. He skimmed around the tree in a lazy arc, approaching the
motionless man on the ground.
The
man opened his arms, as if inviting a lover back. His amber eyes
glowed brighter than the dawn.
The
bird slammed into his chest. Feathers melded with flesh, fluttering
into a pulse and soaking into skin.
Gabriel
let his hands fall. The bird twitched through his consciousness as he
absorbed all it had seen.
Above
him, leaves rustled. Some were living leaves, some dead. The tree
stood, scarred and ancient, but its shadow had grown thin. He reached
up to pluck a brown leaf from a branch of the Hangman’s Tree. This
wasn’t the only withered branch; the tree’s leaves had begun to
curl at the center, as if autumn’s breath had come weeks earlier.
He
turned the leaf over in his hands. The tree was dying. He’d felt it
even before the leaves had begun to drop, as the magic in it
faltered. Even the Lunaria, the Alchemical Tree of Life, couldn’t
survive forever. Not after what it had been put through, creating
generations of undead to haunt the Rutherford Ranch.
Not
after what he had been put through. If he closed his eyes, he could
still remember bleeding into the roots of the Lunaria and the tree’s
frantic efforts to put him back together. He’d been torn to pieces
in the explosion of a collapsing house. Wood had pierced and rent his
body to bits. It would have been best to leave him to dust.
But
no … the other Hanged Men had brought him back here, out of sheer
instinct. And the last raven had been brought back to him, the last
fragment of himself. Through excruciating pain and light, he’d been
revived.
Though
not wholly. He was conscious of vast gaps in his memory, as if time
had eaten away at an old tintype photograph. He’d forgotten his
middle name. He couldn’t remember the exact year he’d come here,
though he knew it had happened over a century ago. He recalled bits
and pieces of alchemy, arcane bits of ephemera about dissolution and
phoenixes. His right hand shook when he wasn’t concentrating on it,
and he’d developed a somewhat mechanical twitch in his left eye. An
irritating limp came and went, even if he parsed his feet away as
ravens and brought them back again.
Revived.
But at terrible cost. The light running through the veins of the tree
grew more sluggish with each sunrise. He could feel it choked off, as
if some force had girdled it beyond retrieval. The end of the tree
would be the end of all the Hanged Men. He remembered that much.
Behind
closed eyes, he thought about that possibility of oblivion.
Nothingness was seductive. No more striving to see another day. Just
dust. He’d had a taste of it, when he’d lain in pieces within the
Lunaria’s embrace.
He
crumpled the brittle leaf in his fist and opened his eyes. His gaze
traveled to the south fence, where the rest of the Hanged Men toiled,
herding the cattle to the north pasture. This wasn’t just about
him; there were the others to think of. The others, who had no voice,
who would simply cease to exist along with him if the tree died. He
could choose to give up—but the decision was not his alone.
And
yet … perhaps he had seen a solution. The part of his consciousness
he’d sent out as a bird had detected something strange.
Something
that might save the last thing he held dear.
About
the Author:
Laura Bickle grew up in rural Ohio, reading entirely
too many comic books out loud to her favorite Wonder Woman doll. After
graduating with an MA in Sociology - Criminology from Ohio State University and
an MLIS in Library Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she
patrolled the stacks at the public library and worked with data systems in
criminal justice. She now dreams up stories about the monsters under the
stairs. Her work has been included in the ALA’s Amelia Bloomer Project 2013
reading list and the State Library of Ohio’s Choose to Read Ohio reading list
for 2015-2016.
More information about Laura’s work can be found at www.laurabickle.com
Thanks very much for hosting me today! I appreciate it!
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